Welcome to ANTH 6413!

this is the only pie chart you will see all semester.

Quick Poll

We have someone with a confilct for the first 30 mins of class….

Who would be OK with changing the course time to 3:30 - 6:00PM?

Course Goals

  • Gain the statistical knowledge to critically evaluate the use of statistics in the literature of bioanthro and related fields.
  • Get hands-on experience implementing analyses with real world data
  • Learn practical tools for doing "data-science"

All fields are becoming more data intensive

"Data-science"

Data science is an industry buzzword and cliche

From wikipedia:

"Data science is an interdisciplinary field about processes and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data in various forms, either structured or unstructured, which is a continuation of some of the data analysis fields such as statistics, data mining, and predictive analytics."

  • It is also a big part of what scientists do!
  • Processes and systems for getting insight from data are important!

Data science pipeline

Confession: I believe tools matter, a lot

  • We will spend a lot of time on the "how"
  • You will become very familiar with the nuts-and-bolts of analyzing data
  • Most of your grade comes from practical exercises

Grading

Assignment Percent
Weekly homework assignments - submitted on Blackboard 40%
Practical Exam 1 20%
Practical Exam 2 20%
Class Project 20%

Outcome of the course

When you leave this course, I hope you are empowered to:

  • collect your data in a format that makes your life easier
  • explore patterns in your data
  • test meaningful hypotheses using appropriate statistical tools
  • communicate these results

Tools of the Trade

  • MS Excel
  • Commercial Statistics Packages (e.g., SPSS)
  • R – open source and free package for statistical analysis

Tools of the Trade

  • MS Excel
  • Commercial Statistics Packages (e.g., SPSS)
  • R – open source and free package for statistical analysis

Why do I use R?

  • Ignorance - Because I don’t know how to use anything else
  • Comprehensiveness – Learn this one tool well, and you can do (almost) ANYTHING
  • Reproducibility – an R script is a detailed record of exactly what I did, from the raw data file, through data transformation, to analysis and results.
  • Popularity - R is insanely popular in academia and in industry ("why hello there, marketable skills!")

What is R?

R is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing and graphics.

open-source means that anyone can look at the code to see how it works.

What is R?

The 5th most popular programming language in the world

What is R?

A rapidly growing system of user contributed packages.

R Studio

Course Website